Read the counterpoint here.
I know it’ll never happen. College sports are too deeply engrained in American society for it to go away.But in a perfect world, we would rethink the college sports system.
College sports got its start all the way back in 1843, when students at Yale formed a boating club. Harvard soon followed suit, and in 1852 they raced each other— the first competition.
The key word here is clubs. Neither school was very serious about the sport. They went to Harvard and Yale for the education, not because they heard that Yale has a world-class boating program. And the clubs weren’t school sponsored. It was just a bunch of students who decided it would be fun to play sports on the side.
Things are completely different now. College football now is treated as a professional sport. They get the same TV coverage, commercialization, and even attendance.
And while some players genuinely want to attend college to get an education (Samson Szakacsy anyone?), the vast majority of star players are simply using the college football system as a launching pad for future NFL careers.
The scholarship money that these guys receive could have gone to someone who intends to go to college to get a degree they will use in the future.
College basketball is getting to the point where the one-and-done is becoming the norm for star athletes. How can this be a part of the educational system?
And I haven’t even scratched the surface on all the recruiting violations that are coming out of the woodwork. That’s a whole other can of worms. But it’s becoming more and more apparent that the idea of a college education for star athletes is becoming a sham.
Obviously the smaller college sports don’t run these problems on such a large scale. But they do happen. USA Swimming has a whole web page on how to avoid recruiting violations. That should not be necessary.
So what’s the solution? A few years back, I spent the summer in Sweden. It turns out that the NFL is actually pretty popular there, and most sports fans have attached themselves a team.
But they had no idea college football existed, and so I spend a good chunk of time explaining the NCAA, the BCS, and the whole system.
The one thing I could not get across to them (besides the BCS rankings system) was the idea that teams are attached to the school. In Europe, the vast majority of professional and even professional sports are done through clubs.
For the Swedes, school is getting your degree, and if you want to play sports after their equivalent of high school, you join a sports club (or if you’re good enough, they recruit you.) If you want to get a degree, you go to college. If you want to do both, you do both, but they’re separate.
This doesn’t mean the Swedish are any less passionate about sports. There’s a pair of soccer goals in just about every city park I saw, and several had football goalposts.
They just know the difference between college and sports, and if we were smart, we would do the same.
Reach the editor at egrasser@asu.edu
